There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Arnem tracked his besetter’s approach, his growing proximity. The light at his back transformed him into a vague horror of shadow. These moments drew out into eternity. Qurzin approached without fear, but slowly. To extract and savor the boy’s terror. He hardly glanced at the brandished swordpoint. When his mangy head of hair eclipsed all the world’s light, Arnem struck.

  The sword came down on his shoulder and cut through the worn leather of his jerkin and into the flesh beneath. Arnem did not feel the stiffness of bone beneath the blade, but struggled to pull it free all the same. Qurzin howled like a wounded beast and stumbled. The boy saw the opportunity and planted a foot in his chest, sent him tumbling down the stair and himself backward into the temple gate. The great doors parted under his meager weight and swallowed him into darkness. The Crowbills erupted into confusion, but were silenced by the crash of the portal sealing closed again. Qurzin’s mewling was all that remained to fill the night. Segved said nothing, only replaced his dagger to its sheath and shook his head with a grin.

  "There goes your fun," he said and mounted the stairwell, kicked at Qurzin as he passed. "Our lure for the Stormcrows, what’s more."

  "It's gone inside an old, dusty ruin is where it's gone," Qurzin said, struggling to his feet.

  "Risked the night for this, and now we're stuck til dawn.”

  "We’ll just go and fetch him. I’ll not have another time that he gets away without me getting my fill.”

  "Well march on into the temple, then," Segved said as he chuckled with the rest of his men. "See if there's anything left to caress, boy-lover. It won't be enough to satisfy your appetites. Not even your imagination, come morning."

  "What're you fools on about? It's just some crumbling pile of rock, is all. Like everything else down here."

  "You've been in this shithole longer than us and longer than most," one of the other Crowbills said, a lanky boy not a few years older than Arnem. Qurzin thought he'd do nicely and often thought as much, but knew that afterward he would do nicely for Segved. "This temple's one of the Old Gods’. Haunted, cursed. Whatever you like."

  "Aye," Segved said. "It's old magic. From before there were squid priests and spellflingers. Even they won't go near it." He stepped away from the monolithic temple, glanced across its pale stone and crystalline symbols of a faith long lost to time. It stood silent and brooding—an ancient, slumbering beast that dared men to mistake its age for weakness. "And I ain't aiming to beat them out."

  ◆◆◆

  Light from the dome and the Vertebrae, twisted together in a single ethereal effulgence, seeped through a fissure that ran the length of the vaulted ceiling and terminated at its broken oculus. It was as high as the immense chamber Arnem found himself in was wide. He could see only so much of it as the weird glow, never meant to replace the moons or stars, would allow.

  Collapsed statuary lay amid rubble fallen from the roof of the temple. The pieces that had not been defaced beyond recognition described sea creatures, but none that he recognized. The shadows and the ruin twisted their shapes into amorphous behemoths that tossed in a sea of stone. Arnem swallowed hard. He listened for the wraiths that were said to abode here, for the creatures he knew enjoyed these ramshackles for their dwellings.

  The boy shrugged off his pack and fumbled with its ties, his fingers fouling on the knots in the half-light. He rummaged through the spare contents until he grasped the familiar feel of his fire-striker. He laid it aside with his pack and began to kick through the debris all around him. His hands searched blind, finding sheaves of discarded vellum and frayed and rotting tapestry, tripping on the rogue stones hidden in the dark.

  Finally Arnem laid hold of a bit of wood. It stuck out from the remains of a fallen cornice that had been sculpted to resemble an obscene beast, beaked and writhing with a dozen tentacles. The timber was lodged in its broken mouth, and he nearly fell over trying to pull it free without coming any closer than necessary. He scrounged together enough of the stray shreds of tapestry to wrap them thick around its most splintered end and made his way carefully back to his pack.

  No amount of striking would set the makeshift torch to light. The sparks flared across the wrappings and died there or fell uselessly away to the floor. The old fabric was damp to the touch, as everything else would be. The must of mildew and mold hung heavy on the air, and Arnem was surprised in hindsight that the floods had not submerged the bottom floors of the temple entirely.

  He almost tossed the striker and the torch away into the dark and picked up his truncheon to go out and meet the Crowbills on his own terms, if only to be out of the too empty gloom. But something itched at the back of his mind. A thought, a memory. He delved back into his pack and withdrew a small container of unvarnished wood.

  Inside was a wet clump of black xylchelt moss, found only at the fringes of the Witherwood and hard to come by. Verem harvested some every time he and his Stormcrows found themselves at the border of the black forest for its combustible qualities. This was some that Arnem had stolen for himself. Monsters liked the night, but neither the night nor any monster he ever heard of liked fire.

  It smelled as foully ichorous as it felt: The stuff clung stubbornly to his fingertips as he tried to smooth it over the wrappings. He set the torch in the nearest crook of the rubble around him and, holding the hand that applied the substance far away, brought a pale flame to light with a single spray of sparks. The wet tangle of moss melted to a black gelatin and then a thin resin as it congealed beneath the flames.

  The nearer corners and heights were divulged from the dark, lit with a stark brilliance unknown to pitched and fired rags. Arnem saw at once how completely the temple was abandoned. Humanity had fled its precincts long ago. Weeds and creepers broke through the stones of the floor and the roots of trees had slowly bludgeoned their way through the walls over time, watered by puddles from the rainwater that had spilled through rents in the roof. Everywhere there were the signs of when last someone set foot inside: mosaics defaced and statues thrown down, the burnt remnants of hangings that had been stripped from the walls, idols scattered amongst bones that had been left just as they had fallen for hundreds of years.

  The boy understood at once why everyone thought the place was haunted. He did not need to see the blood or hear the screams. The evidence was plain. But he did not feel confirmed in those fears or that much more afraid. Only sadness. As if a little of the white at the edges of the map had been cleared away and found wanting, filled in with far gone sorrows. These were the ancient dead that few had ever seen, from when Sulidhe was Sul and the Mageblooded were distant rumors.

  Human remains were unearthed in the Midden often enough that the ruins in their time might have been built as much from bone as stone. Arnem had seen his share, though could never say whether they were from last year or the last hundred. No Middener could. But, there in the temple, Arnem could say he knew. And the city became altogether different for him, the mirror of its reality suddenly turned slightly askew: There were people here once, and Sul was more real than what supplanted it.

  Arnem wondered how many other temples, mills, feasting halls, manufactories and smithies—the crumbling vestiges of Sul—contained such bones before they were looted or finally collapsed under the weight of their memory and shame. He wondered where the dead were that in life looked like him or Oren or Verem. Were these they? Or were his people from the city-above-the-city? He wondered if the blood on the floor was somehow also on his hands, and, if it was so, why Sulidhe’s masters would consign their own people to such a fate.

  The deepening dark concealed far more secrets and mysteries than the naked light ever revealed. Men preferred things buried. It was easier to forget about them. Arnem had brought a light where none had shined for hundreds of years, and he went deeper to pull from the dark more of what lay buried in its depths. A madness was put in him at the sight of the bones, a frenetic need for the knowledge of the temple that the mouths of the skulls he kicked through could
no longer speak. But the further he delved into the expanse of the great hall, the grim signals preponderated that their secrets would remain unspoken, until at last he came to the far end of the chamber.

  A gargantuan shape reared suddenly into the glow of his torch. One relic at least had not been thrown down, much less defaced. Time and the hands of lesser thieves had left its image as untouched as the day the statue was raised. A titan of tarnished bronze, its head triumphantly broaching the greater heights of the chamber, refracted the boy’s light into weird glimmers throughout the gloom. An element of the divine communicated itself to him across the long ages and filled him with wonder.

  He unconsciously adopted the man’s stern expression, absent the whorls of a beard he would not grow for many years and the kelp and coral that he never would save by a curse. He studied its powerful torso, shoulders overgrown with shellfish and barnacles, and marveled at the coils of a serpent that began at its hips. There was strength in its arms that could shake the earth if given a little life. One of the sculpture’s heavy hands held aloft a great conch shell, the other a pair of long scourges that lashed the stone likenesses of waves at its base. Sapphires and emeralds winked in the torchlight, convincing Arnem for an instant that the waters were real and forever stilled by a spell in the long ago. The frozen tide sailed over a wide silver basin that stewed with brackish rainwater. Something wriggled under the surface, a finger of fat white flesh that looked not unlike the maggots that routinely haunted his days in the Midden.

  A presence moved through the air overhead. Arnem ducked instinctively and tripped as he turned to see and fell against the plinth. It was not so close that he felt the winds of its passage, but that was no comfort. For him to have heard the sound and sensed nothing else gave some indication that more than a wayward bird or bat was perched in the shadows above. He eyed closely the roof of dark that covered him, wanting to thrust the torch into its borders and probe further, but terrified of what the light might peel out. As if in answer, a strangled squawk echoed down to him that tapered off into rattling hiss.

  The heights of the chamber began to hum with a faint buzz that was steadily joined by a series of haphazard whirs. Arnem stood, waving his torch this way and that against the black. The noise grew until it reached a tremendous, engulfing discord. As if it were not a temple in the Midden he was in, but somewhere far deeper in the earth where only things banished from the light swelled. Papery shapes dove and danced at the edges of his torchlight, attracted and repulsed at once.

  Finally a thing breached the glow and alighted before him. Even hunched it stood a head taller than the tallest man. Sickly yellow eyes, bulbous in a face of chitin and mandibles, refracted the light of his torch from a dozen different facets. Its head twitched back and forth as it considered him, clawed hands held close to the breast of a skeletal carapace as if the thing meant to bow. A barking croak that settled off into distinct couplings of hisses and rattles erupted from deep within its throat, the same call that heralded its coming and that of the others still circling overhead. Arnem recoiled at the sound and, when two more landed beside the first, fell back onto his rump.

  The plinth was behind him and the creatures in front. Slowly they began to advance. The walls to either side were far distant and the doors by which he entered farther still. He imagined being snatched from the earth as he made for them, torn apart in the chamber’s heights by a swarm of claws and serrated jaws. His heart filled his ears and the acrid smell of his own terror suffused the air.

  Arnem cast about while he scrambled away from the creatures for every step they took, voicing subtle clicks and pops. There on the rear wall, nestled in the farthest shadows behind the statue, was a door. He was at the edge of the plinth now. All it would take was quick thinking and quicker feet. He stormed up from the ground and thrust the torch at them, drove them back before rounding the corner. The boy made for his escape as if a single touch of their claws would split him whole into a pile of flesh, and the ground disappeared beneath him.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Deepening of the Well

  The tendrils of his hand, remade in the image of True Being as only the Sundered Faith saw, lapped at the air. Yrsted could trace the winds of change that they tasted in the psychosphere, vapors seeping out of the hidden places between everything. Between the cracks in the masonry of the ancient ruins, inside the splintering timbers that held up the hovels affixed to them, the divide between every breath Yrsted took. The change was within everything, for the world it heralded leaned heavily against the one in which he moved. The veil between groaned under the weight. His hand, which tasted of its promise, would help to force it wide.

  His path was winding and took him through the Midden’s most outcast places, where even the living dead of the plagued did not go. Beasts roosted and nested among them, he knew, but knew also that the passing of the one he hunted tamed all creatures. Fear was a powerful yoke, and there was none more fearful than the one he scoured the depths of Sulidhe to find. The mark of his passing was all around Yrsted. The ebb of his mind left great miasmas in its wake that the hand lusted for greedily. Those with the misfortune to breathe of them unwillingly would not sleep tonight.

  Yrsted read the passage of the day in the shape of the signature he followed. Amorphous clouds and drifts of mist gave way to a sort of trail as he climbed from the Midden’s outskirts and farther into its interior, where he could risk being seen only in the deepest night. The moons were high in a rare clear sky and conspired with the light of the dome to illuminate the streets below. Yrsted was alone with their emptiness. The Midden’s nightly entombment was well underway. He passed brazenly in the footsteps of the one he pursued, following the hunger of his hand. Its mouths tasted the delectable traces of the mind which excreted these vapors, invisible to anyone but Yrsted, and fed them to him like the drippings off a roast duck. The tongues inside his skull lapped at the pain, the madness and resolution against it, the exquisite fear of Sulidhe’s nearest thing to a god terrified of its own looming demise.

  The trail ended at the antique bulk of the Cistern, its conflux of pipes that channeled the upper tiers’ rainwater and effluvia into the immense reservoir deep within. It was a relic of another kind in the Midden and shared this distinction only with the canals and soulhouses that together lubricated the machinery of the Midden’s existence. Without them, nothing more than a swampy pit populated with starving beasts and lone scavengers would linger on at the buried feet of Sulidhe.

  Yrsted studied its behemoth and alien architecture, eager to drink in the legacy of Sulidhe’s builders that he often sifted through when he availed himself of the Circumspex’s archives. Its like would never be built again, so intricate was its engineering and interior glyphic geometries, and could only be repaired by the best smiths of the Tradesmen’s Tier working jointly with their counterparts in the Mageblooded’s spellwrights. But their skill was not enough to counteract the ultimate strain of use and time, and what would become of the Midden in its absence was a question many gave their days to answering—and not always in the interests of its survival.

  A cloud, fecund with the seepage of the mind he chased, billowed out of the yawning gap between the Cistern’s great doors. The vapors wavered as if by the breathing of a beast, subtle winds that only his tongues could taste. Yrsted entered its cusp and basked in the elements of the metamorphosing mind deep inside.

  There was no light inside the tunnel beyond the gate. The darkness that he moved through was deeper than black and glutted his changed hand. Its rolling across his skin was familiar, but only just. It had not come into its fullness, only tasting of the stuff of Sohrabaia’s well. One world leaned onto the walls of another in the Cistern and whispered to him the litanies of possibility and purity. The herald of the change was come. Yrsted drew nigh to him.

  The traces of his passing served to guide Yrsted through the benighted innards of the Cistern. He was vaguely aware of other corridors stemming from
those which he followed and the behemoth presences of things that shuddered and babbled within. He avoided the hulking and twisted shapes of the gol’yems, though he had been told to expect and ignore them, and stumbled in the dark over the corpses of their minders. The ground was slick with their blood.

  Deep within the vaults of the ancient structure, he heard the machinery pound away that collected the waste and stormwater of the upper tiers. Pipework thrummed in the walls with the resulting drainage, flowing to the purification vats and thence to the dispersion chamber that all the Midden drank from in one form or another. Here the scent was strongest.

  Inside, even standing as he did at the threshold of the reservoir, he could scarcely hear anything but the low roar of the pipes that discharged from the domed ceiling. The glimmer of the glyphs that lined the mouths of the pipes—enchantments that governed the flow at the impetus of a spellwright—refracted across the deep pool that dominated the massive chamber. It was enough to create a diffuse gloom that was just bright enough to see by. And see he did. A pair of towering figures stood out from the shadows on the far side of the pool, struggling with one far smaller, and Yrsted nearly yelped with the glee of being so near the purveyor of his psychic delights.

  The noise of the discharge pouring into the water below drowned out all but the loudest protestations of their captive. They did not hear Yrsted approach as he circled around the edge of the pool, or perhaps took note and were unaffected. Yrsted felt himself a slug at the bottom of the deep’s deepest trench. Utquod whispered to him from that place, where only the truly initiated dare look, and he knew that he was witness to the ultimate of the Squid-God’s triumphs—the avatar of his being in the world.